AbeBooks book blog

Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle

It’s ridiculous, I admit. But when something gets a whole lot of hype, I stubbornly and perversely refuse to try it out myself. For this reason I will never watch Dances With Wolves or drink bubble tea, drive a Prius or play Dance Dance Revolution. So when I started seeing glowing reviews of Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle all over the place, I subconsciously made some bizarre pact with myself to avoid it as long as possible.

Then one of my coworkers put it on my desk.

And now I can’t put it down.

What an engaging read. It’s casually written without sounding slangy or annoying, and fantastical enough that while one has to suspend their disbelief, one does – at least in my case – with an immediate shrug of surrender. The main character has very little redeeming quality to him so far, but I like him anyway.

Other books I have grudgingly loved against my will after swearing not to:

But in my defense, I recently gave in and read The Pilot’s Wife by Anita Shreve after it was recommended to me and kept popping up in conversation – and I think it made me stupider. What a cloying, simpering, undecided disaster of a book. It couldn’t decide whether it was a mystery, a tragedy, or a run-of-the-mill romance, so it ended up being all three, and none of the three, at the same time. It made me mad. And yet, I lack the ability to give up on a book – really any book – once I’ve begun, and finished it anyway. Curses.

But don’t take my word for it. Maybe you’ll love it. After all, I’ve never seen Dances with Wolves. What do I know?